Help with Strategy game

[Wattz]

I'm trying to make a strategy game where you build up an empire and army and all that and try to win the whole map. So I have the map and the players set up and everything, but what I need to do is have an initial city placed on each of the player's first territories.

There are 100 territories set up in a grid. I then use this code to pick and place the 5 players on random starting spots.

function starts () {
	c = 2;
	while (c<=6) {
		num = Math.round(random(99))+1;
		tellTarget (_root.num) {
			gotoAndStop (_root.c);
}
		c = c+1;
	}
}
starts();

c is the frame number of the territory MC. The MC has 6 total, 1 is blank for nuetral territory, and the other 5 are different colors to represent different players. So c starts at 2 because it's the first player color.

num picks the random territory to place the player on. So now I want to place the player's capital city on their first territory so that the game can start. And I tried this:

function starts () {
	c = 2;
	while (c<=6) {
		num = Math.round(random(99))+1;
		tellTarget (_root.num) {
			gotoAndStop (_root.c);
			duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[c][num], c);
			_root.city[c][num]._x = _root[num]._x + 20;
			_root.city[c][num]._y = _root[num]._y + 20;

		}
		c = c+1;
	}
}
starts();

But this doesn't work. I use +20 on both of them because each territory is 40 pixels wide, and this would place the city in the middle of territory. _root.basecity is the MC of the city that I placed off the side of the stage in order to duplicate it. I guess I could have linked it in library instead, but oh well.

Any ideas?

[tonypa]

First, I dunno if you call your functions only from 1 place, but to keep things correct, I would use _root. with c and num variables:

_root.c = 2;
while (_root.c<=6) {
_root.num = Math.round(random(99))+1;
and so on...


When you place cities, you duplicate them into depth=c.
But your territories are also in the depth _root.c I guess.
So what might happen, is that city mc replaces territory mc and so when you try to place it with
_root.city[c][num]._y = _root[num]._y + 20;
then _root[num] mc doesnt exists anymore since its been replaced by _root.city[c][num]. Its just a guess, but try placing cities above everything else, like
duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[c][num], c+10000);

I also dont see much point using names
_root.city[c][num]
while you can safely use just
_root.city[c]


Hope it helped a little

[Wattz]

Ehhh...

It won't duplicate the city MC and place it. That's all I need help with. _root.city[c][num] is used 'cause I need to know which player it belongs to and which territory it's on. In the future players can build more cities, but only one per territory.

[tonypa]

Yes but did you change variables to _root.num and _root.c?

tellTarget (_root.num) {
	gotoAndStop (_root.c);
	duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[c][num], c);
	_root.city[c][num]._x = _root[num]._x + 20;
	_root.city[c][num]._y = _root[num]._y + 20;
}

after you use tell target(_root.num), you cant just write
duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[c][num], c);
because Flash expects to find those num and c variables now inside _root.num mc. I wont write whole code again for you, only this line:
duplicateMovieClip (_root.basecity, _root.city[_root.c][_root.num], _root.c);
but its affecting almost many lines.